The Future of Web3UX - a Paradigm Shift for a Better Collaboration between Design and Development

foreign [Music] hello everyone we have encountered some issues but as designers and researchers we are accustomed to this basically we have iterated so good to see so many new faces uh I am a product designer and a researcher I am one of the co-founders of the web3 ux user research panels and I am leading the ux design and ux research for the threshold Network which was formerly known as keep Network and new Cipher I am also part of the team who's building tbtc which is the first fully decentralized Bitcoin to ethereum bridge I like to say about my job that is to transform extremely complex products into palatable bits I've been designing for around 10 years now and um I've been in the ethereum space since 2018. my goal is to make explorative research part of all of the web 3 products yeah Okay so today's talk is about a new collaboration flow between designers developers and business developers it's a critique brought to the way things are currently handled we'll try to go together um over what could be the issues of the present building process how they affect the product life cycle and we will explore how might we collaborate better from the start and how to be more inclusive today's talk is an open conversation hopefully this subject will set the wheels in motion and I would be happy to hear any ideas suggestions on how we better the proposed approach okay so the future of Wave 3 ux why do we even talk about this is there an issue so anecdotally 70 of the user experience of a web 3 protocol ordap is dictated by the smart contract smart contracts are usually not upgradable so the experience should be Flawless from the start if you are not familiar with how this could be translated to then um the user experience in web 3 is made of the entire user flow and user Journey the number of transactions until the goal is reached which in web 2 e-commerce means the number of clicks the gas spent by the users and the displayed information so what is the current ux situation in web 3 the products are extremely complex and difficult and the development teams are more focused on solving the problems which are localized at the Smart contract um and there are many levels in between the smart contract and the user so this is what's happening the development team meets decides how to uh how the protocol or dap will work they write the smart contract um and afterwards they send it to the audit usually there are multiple all these done in average two to four and after the code has been audited and fixed it fixed the development team decides to bring the design to the table so basically design is brought when all the user Journeys all the user interactions all of the interaction experience has been set in stone and there is no way to go back at this point so there is a tendency for technology to lead the product versus the other way around this means that there is a high likelihood of over engineering and unfortunately ux becomes the a byproduct tech people do not have the priority to put themselves in the user's shoes which is not really an issue unless the entire experience depends on them so this is the current flow and let's check what are the downsides of this flow so the teams are siled which means there is zero collaboration any findings from research design research that require redesigning the experience is impossible because the smart contract has been audited and fixed so there is no turning back design can improve the experience only by adding explanations and ux writing gimmicks um design unfortunately can only cosmetize the product it cannot fundamentally improve the experience product building time is longer because everything is cascading and onboarding and retention of new web3 users is low due to the unfortunate and clunky experience and steep learning curve so we learned why most of the ux resides in the smart contract we learn the current situation in the ethereum product building and the issues of the current flow so how might we improve the state of web 3 ux so first of all we all need to be open-minded and flexible to replace our common behaviors this means stepping out of our comfort zones by changing this bit on track the deliverable the deliverable is the user-facing product not the technical not the smart contract not the back-end product so having a goal a Target to get to a desired ideal outcome is a great place to start from so this is not the product this is the product so let's try to find out about a different way of thinking first of all I would like to start from a process that has been proven to work very well this is the Double Diamond process the Double Diamond which was popularized by the British design Council in 2005. um this process is based on a diverge converge process developed by the linguist Bella vanity this methodology suggests that a product process should have four phases Discovery and definition which together make the explorative and Divergent phase and then development and delivery which together make the iterative and convergent phase so explorative design helps us do the right thing iterative design helps us do the thing right this is my Mantra and I think this should become everybody else's mantra so what could be a flow that respects the two important phases in a product development cycle and it can also respond to the web 3 environment needs so this is a product flow I am proposing that follows the explorative and iterative phases and which I believe with would definitely improve a lot the web 3 product development so what let's break it down so in the explorative Divergent phase everyone is brought to the table from the start design development and business a designer will facilitate stakeholder interviews and each team will map out their requirements the user needs technical constraints business goals they are all considered and taken into account user Journeys are created based on each team's insights and requirements evm constraints security issues user needs pain points kpis and business requirements all of these elements are Incorporated in a high-level user Journey map that will Mark each step a user needs to take in order to achieve their desired goal the user Journeys assumed needs and pain points are probed in explorative research by speaking to real people this is a very impactful moment in the process since we are moving from merely assuming things to actually spending time and observing the people who will in the end use our product so in this type of the process we're testing our ideas and this may be the moment in which we might need to Pivot we might find out that maybe this is not the way to go so afterwards all of the Unearthed insights and findings will be incorporated into the new user Journeys so research has been conducted assumptions have been probed findings had been Incorporated in the into the new user journey and all of the stakeholders have validated them now the interactive phase can start so the new user journey is validated with the users and with the stakeholders on our are now becoming the backbone of the Project based on these documents and artifacts the development team and the design team can start working in parallel the design prototype and smart contract writing is a very important step in which the two teams will need to have constant check-ins and will need to accommodate each other's findings so basically the design team will test the Prototype will have some findings they will communicate them to the smart contract developers the smart contract developers will incorporate these findings into the smart contract and then they will find Solutions of course maybe some Technical Solutions will won't be necessarily perfectly answering to the new needs that have been discovered so they will also communicate these new issues and findings to the design team so there needs to be a constant back and forth in between these teams and there needs to be constant collaboration between the design team and the development team so the benefits of the proposed flow are the following the team is fully integrated and not siled there is constant collaboration and back and forth between the design team and the development team there are shorter building times and of course more time for research and testing so if this sounds like a good approach I invite you to adopt the methodology and adapt it to your organization we need to think of this proposal as a work in progress which will be shaped up by our experiences and needs let's consider this our explorative phase um if you plan to adopt this methodology and implement it in your organization please let me know what were your struggles um which parts of the process worked and which didn't what did you have to do to adapt it to your own company needs what were the struggles or of challenging the status quo did you encounter any any resistance all in all I would love to hear from your experiences with this process because the goal is to evolve it into an adoptable adaptable and helpful process to the entire web 3 space so some great news from the threshold Network and the tbtc team my team was convinced about the benefits of this new methodology so it was decided to adopt it and implement it into our product development process starting 2023 and this means I will also share with you my experiences of adopting and adopting adapting the process um some thoughts of from my colleague Doug who is a great supporter of ux in our organization um he's talking about this methodology and he says there is no hoping and guessing only principled aligned movement that values the user Above All Else and some more good news um threshold network has open source its entire ux research and past ux studies you can find here user research guidelines all of the past studies that I've conducted for keep and threshold Network and different helpful artifacts never forget this love your users thank you [Applause] thank you Sasha amazing presentation so there's a few minutes left maybe somebody has questions yes I always have questions how long would you expect this to take on average I understand it's an exploration by nature but do you have any Intuition or feeling for how long you would take an exploration versus iteration so you mean explorative phase what like okay so generative user research should take two three weeks at most which is not a lot and it's very easy to implement the findings afterwards so you need to start with this it can take even less than that but the most time that it takes is finding the the participants that are meeting the user profile that you're trying to to build for yeah so it doesn't add to the building process it's actually um it shortens it because you know what to build from the start and you know what people are needing and you know if your ideas are actually viable and I don't know responding to the market need yeah I have a question thank you uh basically on the face of integrating users what's your proposal for testnet versus mainnet or of inclusion of the users because we realize that when users are on test net and we when we are on this kind of user testing the users as they are not integrating with real money or real assets their concerns are Way Beyond the when they are on my net but when you are on minute you should have already a functional solution that should work so what's your take on that so I think it's best to to do usability tests on testnet but try to make it as real as possible like what you're testing will be mirroring your product that you're deploying on mainnet and the thing is that if you're giving the users testnet tokens and everything and they will go to to the entire experience at some point they will forget that they are actually testing so you will get very good insights you will find what's fearful and scary for them because basically we are designing for fear so I really I'm a big champion of testing on test Nets yeah okay thank you yep yo great presentation um is there a generative research supposed to align with the Sprint cycles that a product team might have or is it something that goes like again like in parallel and doesn't have to match up with agile I think it it should be part of this Prince cycle or it can be agnostic of the Sprint cycle so you would like start up a like a regenerative research campaign even if it's even if it's outside of the cycles of the product yeah yeah exactly I think it should be in parallel okay cool cool uh I have a question yeah I want to ask how do you reach out to the correct personas how we find them and how many different personas are you considering to make a research it's very difficult uh in my point of view so we don't have a huge pool of participants so first of all I think we should stick to the most important Persona that we have and then after you're building your user profile and you know who you want to build for then I think you should use a screener and also web3 ux which is our user research panel it actually started from this need and this hurdle that is very hard to find participants so yeah screeners and then a pool where these people are and try to invite them can't wait to talk about this more after the con okay sure amazing thank you so much Sasha thank you [Applause]